Sen. Mike Duffy’s trial offers a chance for answers to some unresolved questions

In April, after the RCMP declined to lay charges against Nigel Wright in the matter of the $90,000 payment to Sen. Mike Duffy, the air was thick with instant analysis.

To partisans on the left, it was evidence of a vast conspiracy on the part of the RCMP and others to make the whole story go away. To partisans on the right, it was proof it was all a smear got up by the Media Party, a months-long hysteria campaign over what amounted to nothing more than a simple effort by Wright to repay the taxpayer for Duffy’s expenses.

Well, now the RCMP have charged Duffy, 31 times in all, including three counts — bribery, fraud, and breach of trust — specifically arising from the same $90,000 payment. Which suggests that both of those April storylines might have been a little hasty.

If there were a coverup in the works, charging Duffy, who has not been shy about expressing his sense of being ill-used in the affair and has hinted on several occasions that he knows more than he has let on, would seem just about the worst way to go about it. And while Duffy has only been charged, not convicted — he insists he was an unwilling participant in this “monstrous scheme” — it would seem equally difficult after this to pretend there’s no story here.

Rather, the police appear to be proceeding, albeit slowly, as they should, methodically assembling the evidence, not only with regard to the Wright-Duffy payment, but to the expense claims that preceded and, in part, precipitated it — the other 28 charges. It would behoove the rest of us to follow their example. There are, to be sure, a great many questions still unresolved about the whole affair. But there is no need to answer them before their time.

To the question, in particular, on everyone’s mind — how could Duffy be charged with taking a bribe, the most serious offence, without Wright being charged with giving it — there may be any number of answers. Section 119 (1) of the Criminal Code makes any “member of Parliament” (that includes senators) guilty of an offence who “corruptly accepts, obtains, agrees to accept or attempts to obtain” any “money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment” in exchange for “anything done or omitted to be done . . . by them in their official capacity”; likewise it indicts anyone who “corruptly gives or offers” the same.

The key word is “corruptly.” The RCMP may believe that, while Duffy accepted the money corruptly, Wright did not offer it in the same spirit. Or they may believe they can prove corrupt intent in the first case but not the second. Or they may have offered Wright leniency in exchange for giving evidence against Duffy. Doubtless there are other possibilities. Presumably the truth will emerge in due course; until such time we would do well to hold the speculation.

While Duffy is the one facing charges, he was only ever part of the story. Beyond the immediate matter of his guilt or innocence, his trial will be of interest for the chance it affords to get some answers, at last, to those larger questions I mentioned. Wright will almost certainly be called as a witness. Given Duffy’s contention that he is being made a scapegoat by those higher up, others in the government may be as well — perhaps even the prime minister.

The biggest question to be answered remains: why? Not only why did Wright make the payment — which, remember, was not to “the taxpayer” but to Duffy, in secret and on condition that he remain silent about it — but why were so many other senior people in and around the government, as we learned from the trove of emails unearthed by the RCMP, so utterly transfixed with the task of paying Duffy’s falsely claimed expenses? Why not just leave him to face the consequences of his own actions?

Why, in particular, when it involved colluding in a fairly extensive coverup: peddling the lie that Duffy had repaid his own expenses, leaning on an auditor to minimize his misdeeds and whitewashing a Senate committee report to the same end. It’s entirely possible that stupidity is the primary explanation. But it is also possible that the desire to satisfy Duffy had some other motive, and since none of the principals have been good enough to enlighten us, we must hope Duffy’s trial will provide them with the opportunity.

And of course there is the question that obsesses the political class: what involvement or knowledge did the prime minister have, particularly with regard to the $90,000? In a sense, it does not matter: that so many people close to him were so ready to act in such an unethical fashion is damning enough in itself. But in a sense it is all that matters: partly because the prime minister has been so vehement in his denials of any foreknowledge, and partly because the set of circumstances required for this to be true seem so implausible.

Among other things, it requires us to believe not only that Wright and everyone else around the prime minister lied to him for months on end about how Duffy’s expenses were repaid, but that Wright lied to the others: that having told him at a meeting in February of 2013 that Duffy would repay his own expenses, he then told his fellow conspirators the prime minister was “good to go” with an earlier plan for the party to pay them; and that when Wright later told the prime minister’s former communications director, Andrew MacDougall, that “the PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy” he was lying then, too.

What’s the true story? All in good time. I think we can be sure of one thing: if and when Wright testifies under oath, he will not be lying then.

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile